Schedule

Week 8: Model the puppet and the knife. UV and rig the puppet.
Week 9: Apply textures to the puppet, try out 2 variations of the video (with my hand and without), see which works better.
Week 10: If i go with the "real hand" version, then I'll track the hand movement. I'll start working on the proper light in the scene. If the "CG hand" version goes into business, i will start the animation of this hand.
Week 11: Bring everything to Maya, finish the light work. Start animating the puppet.
Week 12: Continue animation. If possible - finish it.
Week 13: Render out whatever need to be rendered. Comp everything to Nuke. Start working with color adjustments, etc.
Week 14-15: Final touch ups, work with light, color.

The story board

My idea is to create a video which looks like those YouTube homemade videos. A person's sitting in front of the camera with a clown puppet in his hand. While the guy's explaining what he's going to do with the puppet, plans get wrong, the puppet slowly turns it's head towards the guy, then jumps from the hand ad stabs poor bastard.

Now my original idea was that the guy's going scare his roommate with the puppet, because his friend is afraid of clowns and especially of this creepy one. But while I was working on this short storyboard I came up with an interesting alternative but similar idea for this story, which I will post later on.

Concepts

 Here are a few of my concept drawings for the puppet. It won't necessarily will have legs though... those drawings represent something I'm aiming at in terms of mood, level of detail. When I finalize my design for the puppet, I'll submit a digital version.

The assignment and ideas.

When I got details of our VFX assignment, I started thinking on the ideas. My goal was to come up with some idea that can be both original and can look cool. In my mind sprung up an image, Tim Burton's work, which I saw a few months ago and it fascinated me.

I remember I found the very idea of a puppet decapitating it's puppeteer very awesome and I thought that it would be very interesting to see this whole thing in action.

So right now I'm working on different ideas of a puppet, that kills either puppeteer or just some random human. When I get more clear picture of how my video is going to look like, I'll shoot a test video of it to see, if it's going to work.